The Pilbara Crisis: Resource Frontiers in Western Australia

by Melissa F. Baird and Jane Lydon

The remote and fragile Pilbara region of Western Australia contains some of Australia’s greatest mineral wealth, as well as some of its richest, most globally significant Aboriginal heritage. In November 2014 the largest mining rush in the nation’s history abruptly ended, coinciding with the shock announcement that government support for remote Aboriginal communities would be withdrawn as of 2016. Where the state continues to roll back services once considered its basic responsibility and transnational corporations step into the gap to ensure business certainty, developments on the Pilbara as resource frontier mark a crisis symptomatic of many Indigenous communities around the globe. If the Pilbara is a site of investment, extraction, development, and negotiation, it is also Country—the term that Aboriginal people use to describe their inherited places, inhabited by living ancestors who embody the law that guides behavior. This Hot Spots series draws from diverse disciplines, experiences, and backgrounds to examine the extraordinary changes underway in Western Australia.